I usually leave Rick Reilly alone when he chooses to write about golf, because 1. I don't care about golf, and 2. he tends to wax philosophic on golf like it's a beautiful sunset on a beach. But then he decided to compare it to the NBA and NFL, which is like comparing apples and fuckin' rhinoceroses.
Playing for play
I've read this article twice now and don't really get what he means. It seems like "Paying for play" would make more sense. I'll just chalk it up to another swing-and-a-miss joke.
For the 116th straight season, it looks as if American golf is going to get through another year without a labor stoppage. Arnold Palmers for everybody.
Not true in the NFL and the NBA -- both are in lockouts now -- but how we don't have one in golf I'll ever know.
Worst sentence ever written.
If anybody should strike, it's golfers. They have the crummiest deal since Rupert Murdoch bought MySpace.
Yeah, that's something that happened.
Not one of them has a guaranteed contract. In golf, you're promised zilch. You play good, you eat good. You play bad and you're suddenly working behind your uncle's pharmacy counter.
Most NFL players have to worry about that, too.
Per diem? Please. In golf, "per diem" translates as "What my wife gives me in the morning."
"Because women wear the (ugly) pants in golf relationships, amiritefellas?"
Contract year? Every year is your contract year.
Disabled list? Get real. If you break your hand in golf, you'd better have Aflac.
How would one break their hand in golf, besides punching something after a missed shot? And is Aflac the first insurance company that came to mind, or are you doing product placement in columns now? I'm going with the latter, because I can't believe you'd pass up the opportunity for a Geico caveman reference.
You think if Tiger Woods played in the NBA he'd be limping around these past two years without a biweekly paycheck? Are you smoking oregano? In the NBA, he still would have made his many millions per year and the owner would help him wheelbarrow it to the bank.
Fuck you, Reilly, for making me do research on golf for this post. Tiger Woods played in 14 PGA tournaments last year and 5 so far this year. That's 19 4-day tournaments, in which he missed the cut on one, so that's 74 days of "work" over the last about 550. Is this really who you want to hold up as the Cal Ripken Jr. of your sport?
Look at Greg Oden, the rarely dressed center for the NBA's Portland TrailBlazers. In four seasons, he has played 82 games. That's one season spread over four. If he were a golfer, he'd be in Columbus running a big and tall man's shop. But in the NBA, he has made $19.3 million. Nice work if you can get it.
There are so many reasons this analogy doesn't make sense that I don't know where to begin. Let's start with the physical differences between a sport that requires you to run and jump in short, intense bursts over 48 minutes and a sport where you walk everywhere and take as much time as you want to swing a club. Maybe sport A should have something in the way of health insurance for their athletes.
Second, let's look at your math. In his last NBA season, Oden had a PER in 21 games of 23.14, which is pretty damn good, and was ranked 12th in the NBA (if he had played enough games.) That seems high. In 08-09 he played 61 games and had a PER of 18.1, which was good for 63rd, which seems closer to where he should be. So for the purposes of this experiment let's say Greg Oden is the 63rd best player in the NBA.
In 2009 the 63rd best golfer in the world was some guy named Bryce Molder, who made about 1.38 million that year (Fuck you, Reilly, again.) 1.38 mil times 4 is $5.52 million, which isn't quite $19.3 million, but it's not "work at a big and tall men's store" money, either.
Golf might look as though it's all cashmere and courtesy cars, but in reality, these guys get squat.
Again the 63rd best golfer in 2009 made 1.38 million. The 144th best golfer that year made over 500 grand. The top 207 all made 6 figures.
In golf, you pay for your own transportation, your own meals, your own medical, your own lodging. You think Tom Brady pays his own bill when he checks out of the Miami Four Seasons? Phil Mickelson does.
Does he? Or does his sponsor? I've reached the limit of the amount of research I'm doing about golf here, but I suspect some expenses aren't entirely paid by Mickelson.
LeBron James can stink up the finals like 80 inches of Limburger cheese and he still gets his cash. In golf, if you come to a major and freeze, all you're going home with is an ulcer.
Does that mean they take away all the previous money you earned, too? No? Because LeBron's salary is for the 82 games he played before the playoffs. The players then get something called a playoff share, which goes up a little bit depending how well you do, so there is a small financial incentive to keep winning.
In golf if you come to a major and freeze, you still get the money you won in your last tournament, which is a better comparison.
You wanna see a pro golfer laugh? Tell him that the NBA players are hacked off about possibly having their average salary of $6 million trimmed in this lockout. Do you know how many guys on the PGA Tour made that last year? One: Jim Furyk.
You want to see a schoolteacher laugh, and then swear at you? Tell him a punk-ass golfer had the nerve to bemoan their lot in life where they play golf every day and make 6 figures for being the 200th best golfer in the world. Bitch.
"It's hard to really imagine that kind of world," says Justin Leonard, who will play his 19th British Open here Thursday at Royal St. George's. "Guaranteed contracts, no matter what? The rookie salaries? Wow. I can't get my head around all that. That's my incentive to play! I'm kinda proud we start at zero every week."
For every Albert Haynesworth in the guaranteed contract world, there's a Derrick Rose, who's off working his ass off to get better for next year (if it happens) despite the fact that he'll be making the same amount of money either way.
The only tiny morsel golfers have negotiated for themselves is that every year on Tour, a set of 125 guys are promised a chance to make a living. This is not to be confused with promised a living. If you can get there, you have a tee time, but only half of you will be cashing a check.
"We do have one thing those guys don't," says Tom Watson, who has won the British Open five times. "We get to choose where we play. NBA players don't.
Hey, someone said something sensical in this column!
True, and when golfers choose not to play somewhere, they get murdered. Kenny Perry, for instance, got ripped for not playing the British Open for many years.
Of course, I remember all the outrage about Kenny Perry not playing the British Open! (/has never heard of Kenny Perry)
But look at it from his wallet's POV:
- Two round-trip business-class tickets, Kentucky to London: $6,000
- Caddie for the week: $1,500
- Seven nights at the players' hotel: $6,000
- Twenty-one meals at that hotel, where the dollar is limper than the cucumber sandwiches : $2,100
- Transfers, tips, etc.: $750
Total: $16,350
So, before Perry can break even, he has to beat half the best players in the world in a style of golf he hates.
I'm sure if Kenny Perry is really worried about not breaking even, he doesn't have to eat $100 cucumber sandwiches every day, and that number might come down a little bit.
Good luck!
Golfers have the worst job security this side of Naomi Campbell's assistants.
You can feel the air on that whiff from here.
These guys are out there on their own skill and their own guts and their own dime, and they deserve some credit for it. You get the yips or a sore back or an ungrateful putter, we'll see you on the Hooters Tour.
Remember Trevor Immelman?
Nope.
Good-looking kid? Won the 2008 Masters? If he were in the NFL, he'd have signed a five-year deal for $75 million. Instead, he goes out and can't find a fairway with a course map, makes $1.3 million over the next three years, and must be wishing he had gone on to optometry school.
Know what this is? The world's smallest violin playing Trevor Immelman and his 1.3 million he made for playing golf for 3 years.
But none of that is what would drive your basic American multimillionaire team-sport union-backed jocks nuts.
What would drive them nuts is the part of golf's unspoken contract that says: You call your own fouls. On yourself. Even if nobody saw it. Can you imagine if guys called fouls on themselves in the NBA?
We'd still be waiting.
Way to end the column with something that has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of your column, and doesn't enhance the point at all. And again, you're comparing apples to, say, the concept of nirvana. You can't have NBA players call their own fouls for one because basketball is a sport where time matters. Having outside officials is in the nature of the sport.
This is like saying "Can you imagine if baseball players switched their bats after every pitch, like they do in golf? We'd have to wait forever!"
In conclusion, Reilly, you of all people should happy for guaranteed contracts. Because if you were paid for your performance...
